The invention relates to shopping cart attachments effective for providing additional carrying capacity and providing an advertising medium.
Shopping carts are a fixture of most people""s lives and are primarily used when buying numerous. small items, such as groceries, hardware and household items. Many people dread shopping due to the amount of time and inconvenience involved in such a mundane task. This is particularly true in families where both partners work outside the home. Where children are involved the situation is often exacerbated due to the large amount of groceries and household items required. In order to avoid repeated trips to the grocery store persons often xe2x80x9cstock upxe2x80x9d on groceries and household items. This technique often results in a shopping cart filling to capacity, resulting in damage to delicate or fragile items (e.g., books, breads, china, clay pots, fruits and vegetables, eggs, greeting cards, lightbulbs, potato chips, etc.) at the bottom of the cart. This problem is compounded in grocery stores by the fact that most grocery stores are arranged so that the produce section (e.g., apples, bananas, eggplant, lettuce, tomatoes, etc.) is the first department encountered upon entering the store.
In an effort to eliminate this problem, shoppers often place small, delicate and/or fragile items in the area defined by the folded out child seat built in to most shopping carts. Unfortunately, the seat area possesses leg openings to enable a child to extend his/her legs through. The leg openings allow small items to fall out of the shopping cart. Further problems of a sanitary nature can also exist due to small children inhabiting the seat area.
Finally, any solution to the problem of separating small, delicate and fragile items from more rugged items must be able to accommodate the nesting requirement of modern grocery carts. Nesting allows a plurality of shopping carts to be slid together, as a space saving measure when not being used. Still further, the solution would ideally be able to accommodate replaceable advertising to promote particular manufacturer""s products.
Accordingly, a need clearly exists for a device capable of gently retaining small, delicate and fragile items separate and apart from other items within a shopping cart without adversely impacting nestability of the shopping cart or operation of the hinged front wall of a cart, while displaying advertising at the retail location.
The invention is an attachment for a shopping cart effective for gently retaining small, delicate and fragile items, such as eggs and light bulbs, separate and apart from other items within the shopping cart without adversely impacting nestability of the shopping cart. The attachment is useful within any retail store wherein small, delicate and/or fragile items are sold, including specifically, but not exclusively, craft store, department stores, drug stores, electronics stores, grocery stores, hardware stores, shopping malls, toy stores, wholesale or warehouse clubs, etc. The attachment is particularly well suited for use in connection with a grocery cart. The attachment is a pliant or perforated web configured and arranged for substantially horizontal suspension within the basket of a shopping cart, and a means for securing the web to at least two sidewalls of the shopping cart so as to suspend the web within the basket. In another embodiment, the invention comprises a rigid frame configured and arranged to suspend below the upper edge of the shopping cart basket. The invention contains means for displaying replaceable. advertising to alert the consumer to a particular sponsoring manufacturer""s products while at the retail location.